In this episode of Simple Shifts: Conversations on Food, Life, Weight and Mindset, Martha McKinnon and Peter Morrison delve into the principles of ‘Mindless Eating’ by Brian Wansink, discussing how our eating habits are influenced by various factors beyond hunger. They explore practical strategies for mindful eating, emphasizing the importance of portion control and the psychological aspects of food consumption. The discussion highlights personal experiences and insights, aiming to empower listeners to make small, sustainable changes in their eating behaviors.
Key Takeaways
- Martha shares her personal journey of weight loss through insights from ‘Mindless Eating’.
- The importance of mindful eating and recognizing hunger cues is emphasized.
- Peter discusses the social aspect of pickleball and its growth post-pandemic.
- The conversation highlights the influence of portion sizes on eating behavior.
- Martha recounts a personal win of declining dessert when not hungry.
- The concept of ‘mindless margin’ is introduced as a way to manage portion sizes.
- Practical tips include pre-plating food and waiting before seconds to avoid overeating.
- The discussion touches on the psychological effects of food labeling and presentation.
- Martha shares a relatable story about her dog’s weight management as a metaphor for human eating habits.
- The hosts encourage listeners to make small, manageable changes rather than drastic diet shifts.
Mindless Eating Chapters 1 and 2 Podcast
Video Transcript
Martha McKinnon (00:00)
Hi, welcome to Simple Shifts: Conversations on Food, Life, Weight and Mindset. That’s a mouthful. I’m Martha McKinnon from the blog Simple-Nourished-Living and this is Peter Morrison, my partner and brother. Hi everyone. Hi Peter, how’s it going?
Peter Morrison (00:35)
Hi there. Good, how are you doing today?
Martha McKinnon (00:40)
I’m doing really well. So I’m excited. We’re going to start a deeper dive into Mindless Eating by Brian Wansink. It’s a book that as we discussed in the last video podcast really was a huge shift for me. It was just one of those shifts – it was more than just a mindset. It was a whole insight shift where by really reading his book and applying the lessons that it contained, I lost weight – from a place where I had been really stuck.
I lost weight in a way that felt easily and effortless and it just stayed off. I’ve been at or under goal now since that time and diving back into our notes that was way back in 2010. So do the math. That’s a miracle for me for somebody who yo-yoed for so long, you know. So I’m excited to share and do a little deeper dive into the first two chapters, one and two of Mindless Eating.
But before we do that, what’s anything new and good in your world?
Peter Morrison (01:43)
Yeah, where I live, we opened up, the town opened up a new, in one of the public parks, a new pickleball complex. So we’ve got 17 new courts. So that’s been open a couple of weeks now. So…
Martha McKinnon (02:03)
And how many times have you played there? Several. And do they get, I mean, do they get, do those courts fill up? Do they have people playing pretty much on all those courts? Really?
Peter Morrison (02:06)
Several, several, several. Yep. I’ve been there both when they weren’t and when they were all filled up. So weekends are certainly more popular. But surprisingly enough, it almost seems like nobody works these days because I could be down there on a weekday, midday and they could be, if not full, you know, three quarters or so full. And it’s like, doesn’t anybody work anymore?
Martha McKinnon (02:22)
Okay, that’s it.
I well, is it mostly a sport of like, I mean, I guess I have the mindset that it started in retirement communities. And maybe I have no idea if that’s true or not, but.
Peter Morrison (02:51)
No it started, I’m gonna say in the 50s. It was like a summer family thing where they were trying to keep their kids entertained. I think a couple families or a couple brothers and various family members sort of invented it. And I don’t know the progression through the years and how it spread. That I’m not familiar.
Martha McKinnon (02:58)
Okay. Interesting. I didn’t know that.
Peter Morrison (03:20)
I just know around 2020, 2021 when coming out of the lockdowns from the pandemic, people were obviously starved for human interaction. And that’s when pickleball really blew up socially and became a thing. So supposedly,
Martha McKinnon (03:30)
Right. Okay. Okay.
Peter Morrison (03:49)
Well, I’ve read it’s the fastest growing sport in America. I mean, I don’t know how that’s measured or quantified, but.
Martha McKinnon (03:53)
Is it? Right. Well, and we’ve talked a little bit about I mean, it has a lot. I mean, it has a lot of positive aspects, I think, which is helping right with its growth.
Peter Morrison (04:07)
Yeah, being a single, you know, if you’re a single person and like the game, you don’t need to have people ahead of time. If you could find a public park with courts, there’s usually.
Martha McKinnon (04:21)
You just have to show up. So again, it follows in suit with a lot we’re talking about around, you know, behavior change or how things happen. And it just seems, again, it’s easy, right? You don’t have to arrange it. You don’t have to come up with a time and find a bunch of friends who want to play. You can just go and show up as at a designated area at a designated time at a designated location and get to to play.
And that’s a big hurdle in our world where people are just so busy, right? And going in so many directions. If you were trying to organize that yourself, it could take a lot of effort.
Peter Morrison (04:51)
Mm-hmm For sure, it’s like, well, days if I get my work done and I have more time, I could play longer. If I can’t, I might be only able to play for a half hour or an hour, a much shorter time, but you go and you play as long as you can, and then you say, sorry guys, I gotta leave now, and people just come and go, and it’s like, all right, well, see you next time, and so it’s very casual in that regard.
Martha Mckinnon (05:04)
Right? Gotta go. Yeah. It’s great. Right. Yeah.
And I have a friend, I’ve made a new friend down here this winter and he’s just a huge, think I’ve mentioned he was a huge, huge fan and they do quite a bit of travel. And that’s again, what he loves about it is he takes his paddle wherever he goes. And, you know, they were in Puerto Vallarta for a month in February. They’re going over to Palm Springs for a long weekend to be with family.
Peter Morrison (05:48)
Mm-hmm.
Martha McKinnon (05:50)
And, you know, he’s able to play wherever he goes and keep up with something you really enjoy doing, which is cool.
Peter Morrison (05:54)
Mm-hmm.
Martha McKinnon (05:56)
Well, that’s wonderful. Well, I have, I have something that I’m excited to share too. And it’s sort of more in alignment with, with our topic here, in terms of just mindless and mindless and not mindless eating. when on one of our last conversations, we were talking a lot about just how you have really made it part of your deal to eat slowly.
Peter Morrison (05:59)
Yeah, it’s exciting.
Martha McKinnon (06:25)
And I realized that I go in and out of that. I mean, there are times where I have become more mindful around eating slowly and incorporated some techniques. And I realized as part of our conversation that I’d gotten out of that habit. And also the whole concept, I’m really tuning into only eating when I’m hungry. Because I find like, it’s so easy just to see something on the counter or be in the pantry to put something away and suddenly, you know, you’re just grabbing something because you see it.
And so I really tapped in this week to slowing my eating down and just noticing what that did for me in terms of making it easier just to leave food on my plate. was actually able to slow it because I had become back to the clean plate club it seems. know, I these habits can be hard to break and so I was excited about that.
And then another really exciting thing that happened on Monday or Tuesday. I go to Spanish class. There’s a Spanish class here and three of us take a Spanish lesson with a local woman who are our Spanish teacher so there’s four of us and I didn’t realize I’ve only been doing this for a few weeks that it was our Spanish teacher’s birthday so they had arranged to have we take the class in a restaurant so halfway through the class they had these four different desserts come out so that we could celebrate Karina’s birthday.
Peter Morrison (07:45)
Yeah.
Martha McKinnon (07:54)
And I wasn’t hungry. The desserts looked good, they were all different, so everybody got to choose their flavor, but I realized I wasn’t hungry, and so I just said in a really nice way, playing with this new deal where I’m just trying not eating unless I’m hungry. And the old Martha might have felt obligated, like I don’t want to make a scene, or it was so nice of them to go to the trouble, I don’t want to insult anybody, but I decided to just be really honest about it and it and they all enjoyed their dessert and I didn’t feel, I honestly didn’t want it.
And I said, I’ll package it up and then I realized, I offered it too because it was a flavor that Karina, the Spanish teacher, liked and so while she had had hers on the tree, I said, you want to take this home and she was thrilled to take another one home so that she could share with her husband.
Martha McKinnon (08:23)
And so I felt like that was a just real win-win because there are so many other, like I said, I might’ve felt obligated or I might have felt deprived and I didn’t feel any of those things. It was her birthday. It wasn’t my birthday. I wasn’t hungry. For me that was a big victory.
Peter Morrison (09:04)
For sure, I think back to all those years when I worked, you work in an office and it’s somebody’s birthday and HR rolls out the big birthday cake and people gather and you have a piece of cake and how many people, were you even hungry? It’s interesting.
Martha McKinnon (09:16)
Yep. Right. You do it.
It’s sort of interesting. Are you doing it just because are you really want it? Or is it just conditioning? You know, and so if you can just step back and assess for yourself, I mean, there would have been nothing wrong with having the dessert if I really wanted it. I mean, that would have been fine too. But I think it’s just about being intentional, you know, and doing what you really want and not just acting on remote control.
Peter Morrison (09:28)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Martha McKinnon (09:53)
And so the more we can just give ourselves a little space around that. I mean, we can really create these wins for ourselves because that’s that was like I said, it would have been a huge amount of calories that I didn’t really want or need. And I think ideally, we want to move towards eating when we’re hungry, right? There’s always going to be times of celebration and things, but you have to be asking yourself why I mean, the purpose of food ultimately right is to fuel our body and so if we’re eating when we’re not hungry it’s just I think it confuses everything the more I think about it so I wanted to share that because it was a big win in my it was a big pat on the back for me.
Peter Morrison (10:33)
Yeah, absolutely.
Martha McKinnon (10:37)
Alright, so Mindless Eating. Chapters 1 and 2.
Martha McKinnon (10:44)
This is what we’ll tackle today. So again, chapter one, there may be some a little bit of repeat from what I talked about in the last podcast, but Mindless Eating by Brian Wansink explores all the ways that we’re influenced and all the ways we eat more than we realize because of habits, because of influences in our environment. So it’s sort of an anti diet, I would say approach to or an anti-clearly restrictive deprivation type diet approach to weight loss.
Any, do you have any thoughts that you want to share based on your reading of chapter one or do want me to just go ahead?
Peter Morrison (11:31)
I took some notes, which I’m gonna be referring to, so I’ll keep looking down, but I think surprises, things I found hard to believe maybe.
Martha McKinnon (11:37)
Yeah, I’ve got a few notes here too.
So what are some of those? Because I think it is. I think a lot of people read this stuff and say that can’t be true, right?
Peter Morrison (11:50)
Just generally people eat more when you give them a bigger container. It’s like it sounds logical, but at the same time…
Martha McKinnon (11:55)
Right? Why would we be influenced if we were really tuned into our hunger? Why would the size of the container have anything to do with it? Right? And so there’s this great experiment he does, but he’s called the popcorn experiment, right? Did you find that just fascinating?
Peter Morrison (12:02)
Right. Right.
It was stale, popcorn. He said it was safe to eat, but it didn’t taste very good.
Martha McKinnon (12:26)
It wasn’t fresh at all. So, and basically he had this, these, this lab where he could replicate, you know, movie theaters, restaurants, things like that. And so they rep, you know, they on the college campus, they invite people in for a movie. And part of the deal is, you know, free popcorn in exchange for maybe probably rating the movie or whatever. And behind the scenes, people don’t know they’re given a medium size container and then a larger size container randomly.
And they just have this set up so that they can, you know, they give people the popcorn. It’s all been weighed ahead of time. And then as they’re leaving, they have them fill out a questionnaire and they, they don’t know they’re putting their popcorn on a scale. So they’re able to know like how much popcorn did these people eat depending upon whether or not the container was a sort of a medium size or a bigger size. And again, and again, and again, and like, and he says, you could watch the people like they, you know, and this was right after lunch. So people like people weren’t hungry. They knew they had all had lunch.
Peter Morrison (13:16)
Mm-hmm.
Martha McKinnon (13:25)
So it wasn’t like, I just ate it because I was hungry. That wasn’t an excuse. So they removed all those variables. And like you said, you could see people putting the popcorn in their mouth and then like, what is this? But then reaching in again. I think that was the first, again, this was where I got excited because I felt like suddenly I could relate to a lot of these behaviors. Because have you ever eaten something where you didn’t really like it, but it was there and so you kept eating it. I mean, I’ve done that.
Peter Morrison (13:55)
And you’re even as you’re eating it, you’re thinking this tastes terrible. Why am I eating this? But yeah.
Martha McKinnon (13:59)
Right? But then you do it. And I think a lot of us beat ourselves up. We think there’s something wrong with us. We think we have no self-control. All of this negative self-talk that we inflict upon ourselves, you know? And it turns out like, so again, I think that that was the other thing that I just loved about this book that I saw that I wasn’t broken, that I was engaging in behavior that many, many people were engaging in.
Peter Morrison (14:15)
Mm-hmm.
Martha McKinnon (14:29)
And the fact that they demonstrated that if it’s in a bigger container and they did it with other things like frozen yogurt, mean all different ways that they studied this phenomenon, know, the size of your dishes, the size of your soup bowls, popcorn. And so, yeah, so one big takeaway is that the bigger the serving you’re given, the more you’re going to eat, regardless of, you know, hunger. And like I said, a lot of people might poo poo it, but that’s what gets us into trouble, that we think that we’re not influenced by these things. And it turns out we are.
Peter Morrison (15:01)
Right. Yeah, I found this interesting too. Simply thinking that a meal will taste good can lead you to eat more. So again, regardless of the quality of the food, you, and I think that was the, the one they, they served at a glass of Cabernet with the meal where they scrubbed the, the label off the bottle and half the dining room got a California cab and half the room got a North Dakota cab or something like that.
Martha McKinnon (15:16)
Right?
Peter Morrison (15:36)
The same wine.
Martha McKinnon (15:38)
But it was the same wine. But the label suggests that again, anybody who drinks wine knows that North Dakota is not a place that is known for its wine. So it was really just the same wine, but people were given this complimentary glass of wine and then asked to rate their whole dining experience. And the food was the same, the music was the same, the servers were the same.
Peter Morrison (16:03)
Right, but I think some people, they said, like they described, they used big fancy French words to describe the meal. Others, it was like written simply.
Martha McKinnon (16:12)
In a more plain way. Right.
So all of these ways were influenced right to eat like if we like you saying we think it’s going to taste good. Maybe you read this positive review of a restaurant and you’re going out to try it and you already have these expectations that it’s going to be wonderful. mean that will influence right how much you enjoy the meal and how much you eat right. And so I mean the book is just full of all of these ways that were influenced without realizing it.
Peter Morrison (16:21)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.
Martha McKinnon (16:42)
So yeah.
Peter Morrison (16:44)
And here’s one too that I know that I’m guilty of that I can actually not deny. Almost any sign with a number promotion, for example, two for $2, 10 for $10 leads us to buy 30 to a hundred percent more than we normally would.
Martha McKinnon (17:05)
Yeah. So we know now and again, so all of this helps you. I mean, I felt like again, there were so many lessons in this book, right, that I took into my life and reminders. so, and you see that over again, right in promotions, while restaurants will promote sort of buy one, get one, right, eat an entree, take something home, grocery stores, right, are notorious for their, their end caps and their, their displays at the checkout and all designed to entice you to buy more, you know,
Peter Morrison (17:25)
Grocery stores, yeah. Mm-hmm.
Martha McKinnon (17:35)
You walk in for one item and suddenly you see a sign where it’s, you know, three for whatever, whenever there’s a number three for two or by whenever that number is involved and you end up buying more. consequently, if you buy it and bring it home, if we’re talking food, you’re going to end up eating more, right? Because the more plentiful it is. Yeah. They talked a lot about the bigger containers, right? Those Costco size containers and how dangerous they are.
Peter Morrison (17:53)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Martha McKinnon (18:03)
And overcooking along with the danger of leftovers, you know, and the fact that if they’re just there, the more you sort of the more you cook, the more you plate, the more you’re going to eat, regardless of whether you’re hungry or not. And so just these light bulb moments about and again, the cool thing I loved about this book was it didn’t just provide you with that information. It also provides you with ways to offset it right and to mitigate it and steps you can take to prevent being Influenced or affected by these kinds of things.
So they talked a lot about if you buy the big container because it is so much cheaper You know pre-portion it out, you know Put it in the little Ziploc bags Put your you know, if you’ve bought the huge box of cereal put it in a smaller maybe Tupperware container and all these steps you can take so that you’re not as affected by these things.
Peter Morrison (18:32)
Hmm. In this one, I think of it in response to the size plate you’re using if we If we don’t realize we are eating a little less than we need We don’t feel deprived if we don’t feel deprived We are less likely to to backslide and find ourselves overeating to compensate for everything we have foregone.
Martha McKinnon (19:22)
Right? Right. So he talks.
Peter Morrison (19:37)
The key lies in the mindless margin.
Martha McKinnon (19:40)
Right? So I love the concept again of this mindless margin, right? The fact that we all sort of eat what we eat on any given day at a sort of give or it’s going to be give or take, right? And we know when we’ve eaten a huge amount more, and if we suddenly go on a diet and we suddenly cut back the amount of food we’re eating in a significant way, we’re going to be hungry and we’re going to know it, we’re going to start focusing on that.
But there’s this place like he’s saying where you can play where you take just a little bit less and your body doesn’t miss it, especially if you put it on a smaller plate. Right. And so he talks a lot about this really effective way to just like when you’re going to serve up your dinner, take 20 % less than you typically would or 20 % less than you think you want. Load up the put it on a smaller plate so it doesn’t look skimpy, fill in that extra part that you depleted with veggies.
Peter Morrison (20:27)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Martha McKinnon (20:36)
So bump up your veggies a bit. And it’s just in these little changes, this mindless margin where you can effectively slowly start to lose weight in a way that just doesn’t feel uncomfortable. You can just do it and it doesn’t hurt.
Peter Morrison (20:56)
And you’re not eliminating, you don’t have to eliminate certain foods. You you’re still eating the same foods. It’s just a more, the quantity is more in alignment with probably what we actually need.
Martha McKinnon (21:04)
Right?
Right. Because all of our, we know our portions are just keep getting dishes of getting bigger and bigger portions are getting bigger and bigger. So we don’t even realize what a healthy portion would look like anymore. And so, and it would look probably very skimpy compared to what we’re used to. And our eyes, you know, are bigger than our stomach often. So by shrinking the plate, it’s really magical because, and you just, you’re, don’t feel hungry. don’t, you don’t really miss it because it’s so gradual.
Peter Morrison (21:33)
Mm-hmm.
Martha McKinnon (21:43)
I did the same thing, you know, with my golden retriever, my dear Franny. And she started to, she was a little bit overweight. The vet had said, you know, she needs to, she needs to lose a few pounds. And again, it’s so interesting. I mean, we can learn a lot if we start to think about it, right? When, when, when our dog needs to lose a little bit of weight, we don’t put them on a major shift in what they eat, right? We keep feeding them what we feed them, but we just limit the quantity a little bit.
So it used to be she got sort of a rounded cup full of food twice a day. And what I did was just started just, again, the 20 % thing or less. just gave her a little bit less, just under that cup and maybe one or two less treats. And lo and behold, the next time she went to the vet, she was where she needed to be. Again, in a way that didn’t feel overwhelming to her, didn’t have to like…
put her on different food or take any major steps. And I think that’s what we, there’s a lot to be said for that. A lot of times we think we need to lose weight and we think we have to change up everything that we’re doing when maybe the easiest first step is to just look at the amounts and the portions, which would be a heck of a lot easier, right? To keep eating what we like, but just eating a little less of it. I mean, how much less…
Peter Morrison (22:49)
Mm-hmm.
Martha McKinnon (23:08)
overwhelming is that than trying to say I have to go on a Mediterranean diet, I have to go on a paleo diet, have to go plant-based overnight. You know, it’s just so much less overwhelming. So yeah, I love that.
Peter Morrison (23:25)
Yeah, I’m trying to look at my notes from chapter one. What else? Is there anything else?
Martha McKinnon (23:31)
I think those are the big, he talked to again, the 20 % less, he talked about the pre-plating of the food. You know, this whole concept of put your, you know, your food in the kitchen, put the food on your plate, then take your plate to the table instead of doing family style. And again, it’s another way to just slow yourself down, enjoy what’s there, wait 20 minutes before having seconds, you know, just to give your your body a chance to catch up, get that brain-body-brain connection going.
Because oftentimes if we eat quickly, we’re going to overeat before we know it. You know, before we realize, before by the time our stomach catches up to our brain, we’re going to feel, we’re going to feel overful and uncomfortable and be angry with ourselves. You know, how do we do that again? So the whole slowing down and just not, and again, if it’s not on the table, it’s just a way to, to easily give yourself a little more time.
Rod and I played with this one a lot. You know, it’s like, it tasted good. I could eat, you know, it’s that, that feeling of, I could eat a little more, but we’ll just sit here and wait a little bit. And, know, lo and behold, you wait and you’re fine. So that’s a real powerful.
Yeah, so I think we’ve covered the major concepts from chapters one and two. First of all, you’re not broken, you’re human. Deprivation diets are really hard to stick to for any amount of time because our brains and our bodies and our environment work against it. There’s an easier way where we can just start to change our environment.
Start to realize and notice the ways we’re being influenced without realizing it, little habit shifts we can make that don’t feel overwhelming. And I loved his whole concept of with the mindless margin, you know, if you think about it, he has this really simple math program. says if you take, for example, you stop, you eat 150 calories or less per day, which, you know, maybe you give up one soda or something like that, something that wouldn’t really feel like very much at the end of the year, you just cut off the zero.
And so if you did that every day for a year, you’d be 15 pounds less, which, you know, can be in a way that didn’t feel overwhelming because how many people
Peter Morrison (26:00)
I think you said eat 150 calories. It’s reduce your calorie intake by 100.
Martha McKinnon (26:04)
Reduce, I’m sorry, did I say it wrong? So you want to reduce your calories by 150. You want to eat 150 calories less. And by doing that, you would be 15 pounds less. So at the end of the year, if you did that every day for a year. So for example, same thing, if you ate 200 calories less every day for a year, all other things being equal, right? Then you would lose 20 pounds in a year.
And a lot of people will say, that’s nothing, but how many of us just get so we go up and down and up and down and up and down? Maybe we’re at the end of the year, we didn’t, you know, in a much more up and down way, didn’t get to that point. so something to to consider and to play with, I think.
Peter Morrison (26:40)
The year we didn’t, you know, in a much more up and down way, didn’t get to that point. So it’s something to consider and to play with, think. Well, yeah, and he quotes an article, an article by two doctors, where if people just reduced their caloric intake by 100 calories a day, it would essentially wipe out, they didn’t say obesity, but the overweight problem that we’re having.
Martha McKinnon (27:14)
For a lot of, for a major piece of the population. And that’s like, I think there’s a lot of many people who, you know, they were fine for many years and then slowly, you know, every decade the scale keeps just going up and up and up. And it’s like, how did this happen? And it’s just by that little bit of excess. And so if we realized again, these little shifts we could make to minimize that pain and suffering.
It’s pretty, it’s exciting. mean, again, and I, it’s exciting to realize that there are, there are ways that we can begin to address this, that just don’t have to hurt, you know, I’m all about simple, easy, right.
Peter Morrison (28:00)
Well, we talk a lot about tiny habits and small changes and this is really, this is really that it’s, you know, it’s an extra glass of water. It’s one push up.
Martha McKinnon (28:08)
It is. Yeah, this is really that tiny habit simple changes approach that I’m so excited about and so enamored of and because I think it is the answer that that works for the long that that’s sustainable, you know, and and I think we’re going to there have been a lot of comments that have come in from folks that we’ve got on a spreadsheet now for topics that we’ll continue to address over these next weeks…
Peter Morrison (28:29)
Right, right.
Martha McKinnon (28:40)
…in these podcasts and a lot of it is that discussion of people you know I’ve done this so long and it has felt like effort for so long and I’m just tired I’m tired of the effort I’m tired of the struggle on one hand I don’t want to throw in the towel but you know and here there’s I think this is a solution this is an alternative to I understand you’re tired it doesn’t have to continue to be a struggle if you explore what we’re sharing with you here.
Peter Morrison (28:57)
Hmm.
Martha McKinnon (29:09)
What we’re sharing with you here over these next few weeks with Mindless Eating and these tiny shifts that you can make.
Peter Morrison (29:16)
Yeah, I think of so many diet plans or special diets I’ve tried in the past where they essentially have you clean out your pantry and refrigerator and get rid of whatever it is that they want you to eliminate from your diet. And then you have to go shopping and spend several hundred dollars for all these special foods. And there’s an excitement. mean, undeniably for me personally, there’s an excitement like, ooh, you know, this is it. This is the solution.
Martha McKinnon (29:42)
A whole new life.
Peter Morrison (29:46)
And then either you know it gradually it just starts wearing off and it just becomes just too hard, too difficult to you know, because everybody’s busy their day to day. There’s so many things we’re busy with every day. This is. Diet shouldn’t have to be one of them. Right?
Martha McKinnon (30:05)
Right, it’s just not practical. It’s, I mean, like you said, in the excitement, we all get excited. Like this is it, my life. mean, but we’re excited about a thought, right? We’re excited about some thought in our mind about, it’s not, it’s not the reality. What happens is we get excited about this fantasy in our mind.
Peter Morrison (30:15)
Mm-hmm an idea. Yeah.
Martha McKinnon (30:32)
And then, and then the reality of the day, like you’re saying, the reality of the day to day implications of this bumping up againstthe busyness of our lives and all of our deeply ingrained habits and our lifestyle. it just, and again, so you’re just back to where you were, know, many, many hundreds of dollars like in debt or not in debt necessarily, lost.
Peter Morrison (30:39)
Right.
And by comparison, if you could do your same grocery shopping, you’re buying the same foods, you’re cooking the same meals, but maybe like you said, you’re drinking one less soda a day or half a Snickers bar less a day or I mean, very small changes, pretty effortless. You probably won’t even notice.
Martha McKinnon (31:12)
Right. Right, a little less food, no seconds. Right.
Peter Morrison (31:19)
And it could make it can make a huge change, but you have to be patient. You have to let it work. Give it time.
Martha McKinnon (31:28)
But again, think the success from making these little shifts, you you do, you do these little shifts and you get excited and it builds and suddenly you’re finding other ways to make more little shifts. And that’s what I found. Even for me after all these years, just in the conversation, like I said, that spurred from me speaking with you about slowing down and reevaluating. Cause there was a time when I was really good and tuned in about, you know, putting the fork down between mouthfuls and stopping, you know, when I got to that point.
Martha McKinnon (31:58)
Or remembering to only eat, you know, when I was hungry. And then suddenly you just revert back to these old behaviors. You know, you’re stepping into the pantry, you’re grabbing a cookie because you happen to see it there. You’re suddenly not staying tuned in and you’re cleaning out your plate. know, suddenly you’re putting the food back on the table family style instead of pre-plating, reaching for the bigger plate instead of the of the smaller plate.
Peter Morrison (32:28)
So I think we need these reminders. But then, like I said, this excitement that you don’t have to change everything drastically. Just start small, start steady, and it builds. the excitement builds.
Peter Morrison (32:45)
Yeah, and I think, you know, when you’re able to tighten your belt a little more or you start having small victories, I think that then provides the encouragement and the motivation to keep going.
Martha McKinnon (32:56)
Yeah. Yeah, yeah, so, so good. So thanks for reading along with me. I know because you’ve heard me talking about this book for years and years and years. So I’m happy that we’re doing this and we’ll be back in our next session to explore chapters three and four.
Peter Morrison (33:05)
So, exciting. Thanks everyone and if you found this video helpful, please hit the subscribe and like button and if there’s anyone you’d like to share it with, please do. Bye bye.
Martha McKinnon (33:33)
Alright, we’ll be back soon. Thanks. Bye.
